1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a material processing apparatus materials, a material processing method, and a material processing program.
2. Background Art
Generally, for example, in educational institutes, such as schools or private schools, there are many cases in which educational teaching materials, such as test papers or sheets for exercises, are used. That is, it has been widely known that, with an educational teaching material having questions and answer fields, a pupil enters answers on the educational teaching material, and a teacher grades the entered answers.
As regards the educational teaching materials, simplification of grading is highly demanded. Accordingly, a system has been suggested in which, in order to realize simplification of grading, for example, a grading board and a grading pen are connected to a personal computer (hereinafter, referred to as ‘PC’) and grading is performed with the grading pen in a state in which an educational teaching material is positioned at a predetermined position of the grading board (for example, see JP-A-6-266278). In this system, position information and correct/incorrect information of the answers entered on the educational teaching material are inputted to the PC, such that automatic grading is performed on the answers on the educational teaching material by means of the PC.
However, it is not necessarily desirable that, at the time of grading the educational teaching material, dedicated constituent devices, such as the grading board, the grading pen, and the like, need to be provided. This is because the dedicated constituent devices cause the complex configuration of the entire system or high costs. Further, if the dedicated constituent devices need to be provided, compatible educational teaching materials may be limited, and thus versatility for the educational teaching materials may be limited.
On the other hand, in recent years, the PC, a copy machine, or a multi-functional machine, in which a scan function, a print function, and a network communication function are integrated, is generally installed and used.
For this reason, as regards grading of the educational teaching material, for example, the educational teaching material, on which the entry of a correct/incorrect determination, such as ‘∘’ or ‘x’, is made, is read by use of the scan function of the copy machine or the like, and then an image processing is performed on image data, which is the read result, by use of an image processing function of the PC or the like. Accordingly, automatic grading for the answers on the educational teaching material can be performed, without providing special constituent devices. Specifically, if image data is obtained from the educational teaching material, the entry contents of correct/incorrect determinations are extracted from image data, and the points of the correct/incorrect determinations entered on the educational teaching material are totaled. Further, the content of the name put to the educational teaching material by an answerer is extracted from image data and the answerer is specified by use of an OCR (Optical Character Reader) technology or the like. The totaled result of the points is outputted in correlating with the determination result of the answerer. Accordingly, the same result of automatic grading as that in Patent Document 1 described above is obtained.
Here, at the time of grading the educational teaching material described above, the points distributed to the correct/incorrect determinations, that is, the points distributed to the questions need to be recognized, in addition to the extraction of the entry contents of the correct/incorrect determinations. This is because, if the points distributed to the respective questions are not known, totaling of the points is not performed. For this reason, in order to perform grading of the educational teaching material, information (hereinafter, referred to as distributed point information) for specifying the points distributed to the respective questions needs to be provided.
On the educational teaching material, since the plurality of questions and the answer fields thereof are distributed, the distributed points generally differ from one another. Besides, various kinds of educational teaching materials exit, for example, by subjects or grades of pupils.
As regards grading of the educational teaching material, the distributed point information is stored in advance in a system or device, which performs grading, and is used at the time of grading. However, in view of a trouble in creating or inputting the distributed point information, it is not desirable.